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FILM; Seasons Change: She's December and He's May

By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Published: July 21, 2002

THERE'S a scene in Nicole Holofcener's recent film ''Lovely and Amazing'' in which Catherine Keener, playing a dispirited, disillusioned and, incidentally, married 36-year-old woman named Michelle, gets caught making out in her car with her 17-year-old boyfriend -- by his mother. It's late; mom has rushed out of the house in her nightclothes to rescue her child from the clutches of this wicked seductress.

Disheveled and disoriented, Michelle looks up at the angry mama bear glaring through the car window and says the first thing that pops into her head: ''I have the same bathrobe!''

That scene may not represent the most sublime qualities of love between older women and younger men. But the wonderful thing about the remark, a disarmingly honest blurt, is that it catapults Michelle's ''illicit'' affair -- which, for what it's worth, was instigated by her young beau, played by the swoon-inducingly sensitive Jake Gyllenhaal -- straight into the territory of the mundane. After all, you can't get more everyday than a washed and faded chenille bathrobe.

Relationships between older women and younger men haven't become an everyday thing in the movies. But the theme has surfaced in several recent pictures: besides ''Lovely and Amazing,'' there's Gary Winick's ''Tadpole,'' starring Sigourney Weaver, Bebe Neuwirth and the newcomer Aaron Stanford, about a 15-year-old prep school student who has fallen deeply in love with his stepmother but tumbles instead into a one-night stand with her best friend.

''Igby Goes Down'' (opening in September) features a sex scene between Amanda Peet, as a worldly beauty, and Kieran Culkin, as a military school truant. And while Ms. Peet is no granny, the age difference between her and her co-star is still substantial. The subject also figures in ''Crush,'' a British film released here this spring, in which Andie MacDowell plays a middle-aged schoolteacher involved in a passionate (and potentially long-term) relationship with a much younger former student.

Perhaps the idea of older women hooking up with younger men is one whose time has come; though it's probably more that the mad jumble of modern lives has opened us up to more varied romantic possibilities. Movies have traditionally treated the older-woman, younger-man pairing either as a jokey novelty (as in the dismal 1983 Andrew McCarthy-Jacqueline Bisset comedy ''Class'') or as a cautionary tale in which the young lad learns his lesson and moves -- or runs -- on. (In the 1967 ''The Graduate,'' Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson poaches the young Dustin Hoffman while dressed in a succession of animal prints that growl, ''The better to eat you with, my dear.'')

And while foreign pictures like Bertrand Blier's 1974 ''Going Places'' and Agnès Varda's 1987 ''Kung-Fu Master'' suggest that European filmmakers are more comfortable with love scenes between older women and younger men (in the case of ''Kung-Fu Master,'' a pre-teenage boy), they haven't necessarily done a better job of dealing with the complexities those relationships might present in real life.

But the latest crop of American movies that feature older woman-younger man pairings suggest that even though the subject is still somewhat taboo, filmmakers are open to treating them as just another variation in the polychrome world of romantic relationships.

''I was just trying to entertain people and do a film that would, I hoped, make people laugh,'' Mr. Winick said of ''Tadpole,'' which opened on Friday. For Mr. Winick, having a 15-year-old fall in love with his stepmother was intended not as a grand statement but as a device on which to hang numerous comic possibilities. ''It's a nonerotic love,'' Mr. Winick points out, noting that the young man, a sensitive lad who loves Voltaire, speaks fluent French and thinks he can tell everything about a woman by her hands, is hardly out for a quick roll in the hay. ''It has nothing to do with anything lustful. He adores and is fascinated with his stepmother's sensitivity and her passion and her hands. So it's nothing sexual.''

But then, ''Tadpole'' is a tender fable told from the young swain's point of view, not from that of Ms. Weaver's character (the stepmother) or Ms. Neuwirth's (the best friend). The young fellow played by Mr. Stanford, appalled that he has succumbed to Ms. Neuwirth's charms (his excuse is that he was drunk and confused), pushes her away repeatedly and harshly when she teasingly suggests that she wouldn't mind sleeping with him again.

His prudishness serves the story, but it's hard to watch a movie in which Ms. Neuwirth -- who will probably be as vibrantly beautiful at 70 as she is now at 43 -- is stuck playing the ''older'' woman who's rebuffed for the sake of the youthful protagonist's principles. Principles, shminciples -- who wouldn't want to sleep with Bebe Neuwirth?

It may take some time for romances between older women and younger men to feel natural and believable in the movies, even though in real life people seem to be more accepting of pairings that might have raised eyebrows 20 years ago. Among celebrities, there's a healthy handful of relationships in which the woman is older, among them Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins and Julianne Moore and Bart Freundlich. More often than not, in movies as well as in reality, relationships between older women and younger men are still treated as a short-lived phase -- even if Mrs. Robinson's predatory outfits are a thing of the past.